Adding assembly references to a project from a specified path

The current development setup I'm using involves us keeping shared assemblies in a particular path, for example C:\dev\references, so that we all reference the same version.

I'd like to be able to add one of those references to my project but I'm having trouble figuring out how since I don't see anything on new-item that tells me where it looks for assemblies. get-help new-item -examples has code like:

New-Item -Path . -name System.Xml -type assembly

... which is great for system assemblies, but I'm not sure how to add assemblies from a custom location. Is there some sort of $ReferencePath variable I need to add my location to?